How to best use Ad Planner?

I am getting increasingly frustrated with Ad Planner. If anyone could help me understand the nuts and bolts of this tool it would be highly appreciated.

Whenever I am pitching GDN to a client, the following question always comes up sooner or later:

"Where will my ads be shown?"

....and every now and then I try to use Ad Planner to answer that question quickly.... and every time I do, this raises more questions than it answers.

For instance, I am using "Search for Placements" with the following options

What are you looking for?

- Locations in the GDN where an ad can appear.

Audience:

- Morocco

- Arabic, English, Dutch, French

Question: Given that hardly anyone speaks Dutch in Morocco, and that many have Spanish as a first or second language, why can I choose Dutch, but not Spanish??? Also, Amazigh is the second official language, but that's not an option either.... but Dutch? Dutch?? It cant be Dutch tourists, since there are far more Russians....

Content:

- Site Language: Arabic, French

- Topics: Shopping

Question: When choosing a "parent topic" the "child topics" are not selected. Do we need to manually select all child topics to make sure we get everything within that topic?

Placement:

- Text, Display, Video

Attributes:

- Only show results that accept advertising

Now the output doesn't really match up with the input:

- Looking at the category column, hardly anything is shopping. This column seems more like white noise with no signal, contradicting the input I gave (Topics: Shopping).

- Some placements make absolutely no sense. android.admob.adsenseformobileapps.com for example. This placement gives no more information than saying it is on mobile devices. (By targeting mobile devices I will get impressions on mobile devices. Not really useful IMHO).

- Some placements do not seem to have AdSense running on their site, which contradicts the very first input I gave ("What are you looking for? Locations in the GDN where an ad can appear"). One such example is leboncoin.fr. I have looked and looked and cannot for the life of me find any banner ads on that site.

Can someone please explain what is going on here? Is there something obvious that I haven't understood? Am I the only one with these issues?

Any input would be highly appreciated as this tool is making me feel like a kid with ADHD in math class.

Re: How to best use Ad Planner?

I understand your frustration as I've had my own issues with AdPlanner as well, however the more you play around with it the easier/more comfortable you'll become. I'll try to help as best I can by tackling each question.

There are several different ways to display ads across the display network, so depending on which method you choose can further help clarify to a client. For example, contextual targeting. This is going to be reliant on your keywords/themes in order to contextual match your ad to sites across the display network. So technically, you might not know which sites your ad will appear on but you should be confident that the ad will show on sites that have relevant content when comapred to your keywords/themes.

Audience:

As far as why those certain languages are shown when choosing to target Morocco, I'm not sure. I would suspect that these are the top languages spoken in the area based on user's Google languauge settings.

Content:

No, you will not need to individually select each child topic if the parent topic is checked. I'm not sure why Google doesn't auto-check these when checking the parent topic, confusing I know. Also, instead of choosing Site Language, I would select Audience Language for Arabic & French as this will provide more results.

Placement:

- My results tended to provide plenty of shopping placements. I went ahead and sorted by category by clicking on the 'All Categories' header. At first it seemed as if there were not many shopping placements as they were scattered among all the results, but sorting the list made it much more clear and there are actually plenty of shopping results present.

- The Android.AdMob site was not presented to me so not sure what you were seeing.

- leboncoin.fr does have banner ads. Take a look at this page - top, front and center.

Re: How to best use Ad Planner?

I understand your frustration as I've had my own issues with AdPlanner as well, however the more you play around with it the easier/more comfortable you'll become. I'll try to help as best I can by tackling each question.

There are several different ways to display ads across the display network, so depending on which method you choose can further help clarify to a client. For example, contextual targeting. This is going to be reliant on your keywords/themes in order to contextual match your ad to sites across the display network. So technically, you might not know which sites your ad will appear on but you should be confident that the ad will show on sites that have relevant content when comapred to your keywords/themes.

Audience:

As far as why those certain languages are shown when choosing to target Morocco, I'm not sure. I would suspect that these are the top languages spoken in the area based on user's Google languauge settings.

Content:

No, you will not need to individually select each child topic if the parent topic is checked. I'm not sure why Google doesn't auto-check these when checking the parent topic, confusing I know. Also, instead of choosing Site Language, I would select Audience Language for Arabic & French as this will provide more results.

Placement:

- My results tended to provide plenty of shopping placements. I went ahead and sorted by category by clicking on the 'All Categories' header. At first it seemed as if there were not many shopping placements as they were scattered among all the results, but sorting the list made it much more clear and there are actually plenty of shopping results present.

- The Android.AdMob site was not presented to me so not sure what you were seeing.

- leboncoin.fr does have banner ads. Take a look at this page - top, front and center.